A close call
Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2014 6:42 am
Earth was nearly plunged into technological chaos two years ago when it barely missed being hit
by a coronal mass ejection.
What would happen if a massive solar storm hit Earth?
By Sheena McFarland
The Salt Lake Tribune
First, your radio would stop working. Your GPS likely would get confused.
Minutes to hours later, satellites would start failing, interrupting communications and televisions.
Then, the next day, widespread blackouts. Nothing that needed a wall socket would work. Most toilets wouldn’t flush because most water supplies work on electric pumps.
The damage could total trillions of dollars and take months or years to fully mend.
It’s a scenario every human on Earth could be facing had A MASSIVE SOLAR STORM not narrowly missed the planet two years ago.
"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado told Tony Phillips of Science@NASA. "I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did. If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire."
Baker and colleagues wrote a paper for the December 2013 issue of the journal Space Weather about the powerful storm — formally called a coronal mass ejection (CME) — that tore through the space between the Sun and Earth’s orbit on July 23, 2012. A CME is composed of massive gas clouds that are threaded with magnetic field lines that wreak havoc on the planet’s magnetic fields. Had it hit the Earth, there would not have been an impact crater, but the magnetic fields surrounding the planet would have been thrown into chaos.
Instead of hitting the planet, it struck NASA’s STEREO-A (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft, which trails the Earth along the planet’s orbit. The observatory was equipped to withstand CMEs and collect massive and detailed data about the effects of one.
The storm proved at least as powerful as the Carrington Event, which took place in September of 1859. Then, the Northern Lights stretched to Cuba and caused telegraph lines to spark and telegraph offices to start on fire.
The National Academy of Sciences said if the storm hit today, it would cause $2 trillion in damage. The multi-ton power transformers that would be fried could take years to mend.
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